First off, being a community manager is not for everyone. When I used to run the SlingCommunity, I used to tell people the right way to do it was to live with a combination of thick- and thin-skinnedness. I had to remain thinskinned enough where I took every piece of negative feedback openly and honestly. It’s never about user error or someone “not getting it”, it’s about doing it better and better until they do “get it,” regardless of how right I was (or wasn’t). That said, it’s also key to be thickskinned enough where not everything is taken personally, it’s important not to get mired down in negativity… (read on)

I’ve read post after post from bloggers and entrepreneurs on how the best way to market your company is by being the uber-evangelist and making relationships with all the key influencers. It’s great in theory, and for the very lucky few who can pull it off, I say mazel tov. The unfortunate reality with this kind of advice is it just doesn’t apply to most entrepreneurs or CEOs, and is over-the-top idealistic… (read on)

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That’s “ennui”, not “envy”, and I’m writing about the fairly dull times we are living in. From an awesome new gadget perspective, that is.

The Age of Enlightened Gadgets spanned the first half of this decade, where a virtually continuous stream of new and fascinating toys were built by both large manufacturers and new upstarts. I’d probably look back at the launches for the original PalmPilot and TiVo as the Big Bang moments. The first generation digital cameras also helped kickstart the gadget world.

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with Ryan Block, former Editor-in-Chief of Engadget and cofounder of gdgt.com, he was actually the one who first commented to me about the changing gadget world. I asked him why he felt 2001-05 was a more exciting time, he said “It’s the point in which non-geeky people started buying personal technology in droves. Cellphones, digital cameras, laptops — they became tools of mere mortals, not just tools of the trade.”

Today, however, I feel things are a little more… boring. Phones, cameras, MP3 players, etc – they are all fairly well-defined. The netbook category is probably the only really exciting new entrant we’ve seen in recent history. Sure there are oddballs along the way (Slingbox, LiveScribe, USB Humping Dog, etc), but for the most part our categories are almost too well-defined (which is a huge part of why I got involved in working with Bug Labs). I find it hard to get excited about a new, slightly better phone, or higher-resolution camera, flatter screen, etc.

I’ve had the opportunity to build and market consumer electronics products with about a dozen different companies, from the biggest to the smallest manufacturers. They all face the same set of challenges, including a very high failure ratio (for experimental products), a high barrier to entry (engineering, manufacturing, sourcing, support, etc), a rapidly changing technology landscape (wireless standards, codecs, etc), and a lack of sufficient expertise in dealing with all these matters. To clarify: there are tons of experts at these companies, but few of them deal with the sum of all these issues. The guy who was in charge of building AV receivers in the 80s is now dealing with on-screen complicated GUIs, and these are radically different skill sets.

My prediction is we’ll continue through another couple of years of playing the current game. Apple will remain the pioneer in enthralling us (like it or not) with their product evolutions. The majority of other players will continue to attempt to copy Apple, and continue to fall short (the quantity of poorly designed touchscreen phones is amazing to me – here’s a hint: stop trying to clone it, start trying to out-do it). We’ll continue to see the same categories of gadgets, each with minor evolutions occur (adding WiFi to an MP3 player or camera is not a revolutionary enhancement).

And then something interesting will happen. Breakthroughs in material science will create radically new opportunities. Pervasive Internet will change the way we think about storage. Location-based services might actually find a use. Modularity will gain mainstream use and appeal. I don’t know when. I don’t know exactly how. But it’s going to be a fun ride when it starts.

Game experiences “can be quite valuable from the standpoint of civic and political engagement.”

Video games can provide hands-on learning opportunities for kids that can be much more meaningful than reading a textbook. For instance, you can play a mayor in “SimCity,” and get a close-up look at what it takes to build and maintain a community.

Helping a newbie get his sea legs in a game simulates the real-world experience of volunteering. And playing games online can expose kids to people with worldviews that differ from their own — in positive and negative ways.

Many of the of the 1,102 teenagers polled said they’d encountered hostility, racism and sexism while playing online — stuff that can certainly happen offline too, says Kahne. “Just as some playground experiences are enriching and some are unpleasant for young people, one can imagine that that would be true in the game world.”

I’ve played games “online” for two decades (I used to play Populous against people over dial-up back in the 80s). I’ve played pretty much every category of game online, from real-time strategy (aka RTS, like StarCraft or Command and Conquer) to first-person shooter (aka FPS, like Doom, Quake, or my current fave Call of Duty 4) to casual games (like Hearts, Spades, Scrabulous). And while I can’t claim to be excellent at any of them, it’s certainly clear that I’ve wasted many many hours of my life so far.

After reading the MSNBC article I couldn’t help but wonder how much video game playing the researchers had done. First, comparing any aspect of SimCity to running real cities is like comparing playing Call of Duty 4 to, say, war. I’d say the most practical skills I’ve gained from video games include my abilities to use a bucket of water to catch rapidly dropped bombs, I’m pretty damn awesome at shooting down evil catpeople in spaceships, and I’ve always been more cautious around @’s, D’s and L’s than I am near o’s and g’s (bonus points to anyone who can name all three games).

Also, the comments about helping newbies are very domain-specific. There are some games where this is true, but I’d say the majority of n00bs (as they are actually called) pretty much have to fend for themselves or have a real-life friend come over. Playing Call of Duty 4, for example, has near-constant mockery of anyone making basically any mistake, or even using certain weapons. Playing RTS games, on the other hand, you are more likely to get some constructive help/tips, but this generally comes long after being demolished in the first 10 minutes of the game. I am not a World-of-Warcraft player, but I’d assume that’s an easier place to make friends.

I think it’s also pretty clear that the researchers haven’t spent much time on Xbox Live, which is the den of monsters as far as terrible online behavior is concerned. I’ve never heard such a quantity of hate-filled kids (and sometimes adults, but mostly kids) in a room, and it’s clearly language they’d never use off-line. There’s something very wrong about the amazing level of anonymity the Xbox Live experience presents, as I sincerely doubt we have a generation of evil-minded children running around the country. But I do ponder the particular home scenarios for these kids, and wonder about their unsupervised and more importantly, uneducated time online.

A few years from now my wife and I will have to decide about what we’ll be comfortable with in our home regarding Internet use, which will specifically include gaming. I think it’ll be important for us to teach responsibility and general codes of conduct. I’ve never felt the ability nor desire to become a racist arrogant sexist moron while playing video games online. But maybe that’s because when I was a 14-year-old gamer, I didn’t have 35-year-olds to beat up on all day and all night.

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In brief: TuneUp (500 song cleanups for free, $12/yr subscription, $20 lifetime license) makes it easy to find missing metadata for songs and missing album art.

I bet your music collection is a lot like mine used to be: a hodgepodge of mp3s, m4as, and other types of audio files that you’ve acquired over the years and ripped using various shareware products of dubious quality, resulting in hundreds or thousands of tracks that are misspelled, missing album names, and are generally a mess:

Sad Snippets of my pre-TuneUp music collection are coupled with…

… an even sadder dearth of album covers.

Sorting your library in iTunes yields a list of songs named “Track 01 – Insert Song Name Here” or “Kanye West Christmas Album 02: Jingle #(@*#ing Bells.” You’re missing album art, your genres are a mess. And, since doing a file-by-file fix would take hour upon frustrating hour, there’s no prospect of things getting better any time soon.

But don’t lose hope, because TuneUp (Windows only, Mac version coming this fall) is here to help. Launched earlier this year by the TuneUp Media, TuneUp offers a dead-simple way to scan audio files and correct missing or corrupt meta data, including album cover art. Its back-end is powered by Gracenote’s music fingerprinting service, which boasts a database of 80 million different tracks and 6 million albums.

Cleaning up your wayward tunes is easy – drag incomplete tracks to TuneUp’s interface, and the program returns results in a few seconds. Click to approve the suggested changes to update the file information, or reject suggestions or undo changes if you see a mistake.

In addition to scrubbing features, TuneUp offers a “Now Playing” companion that suggests YouTube videos, merchandise, and concert schedules for the song that you’re scrubbing or playing.

It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s just that sometimes I need some me time: Like a needy, whiney, insecure significant other, TuneUp won’t let you start iTunes without TuneUp tagging along. There is no feature in the preferences to disable this, and a forum posting on the topic doesn’t contain any reassurance that it will be coming anytime soon. Without uninstalling the program, I couldn’t find any obvious way to prevent TuneUp from loading.

As for my results? Take a look:

If you’ve got an eyesore of a music library that seems to taunt you every time you try and find a mislabeled track, you would be well-served by shelling out an Andrew Jackson to give TuneUp a try. It does what it says it will do, and does it well. As long as you’ve got a couple of hours to kill and don’t mind an application that loads every time you run iTunes, you will be rewarded with a music library that is so pristine that it looks like you actually paid for every single one of your tracks.

Editor (JT)’s Note: While I have both a personal and professional relationship with the TuneUp team, I did no edits whatsoever to this review, nor provide any direction or insight into the content, tone, etc. My only involvement was to provide an introduction between Dan Rubin (article author) and the individual providing reviewer support at TuneUp.

I’m a fan of FriendFeed, the Internet service aggregator self-described as:

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

For an example of it in action, you can see my profile here. Basically the site pulls from a variety of sources, such as Digg, YouTube, Flickr, my blog, etc, and presents all the content in one view. As you can see to the right of this screen, I use a widget to show my latest content from FriendFeed here on the blog.

While FriendFeed (FF) is a neat way to follow someone, it gets much more interesting when you use it as a new type of discussion forum. If you click here, you’ll see everything I’ve commented on. Again, from a “watcher’s” perspective, it’s still only moderately interesting (at best), and if you don’t see the point right now, I totally understand. Personally, I like the ability to rapidly share content and interact with others in fun (or serious) debate and discussion. I still believe it’s a niche play right now, but I think they have an interesting opportunity to get much much bigger.

At present, if you comment on one of my blog posts, that comment is stuck, it’s isolated to my blog (though it is retrievable over RSS, for those who really want it). I could use a service such as Disqus or CoComment, which allow my comments to get aggregated with other blogs’ comments, but I don’t really see how that benefits either me, my reader, or those who leave comments here. That said, those services are also integrated back into FF, which means a Disqus user’s comment on a blog post ALSO appears as a new content entry in FF. This is only the beginning of the mess, which compounds as users can comment on a Disqus comment INSIDE FF, but that comment doesn’t make it OUTSIDE back to Disqus.

If I’ve lost you, don’t be alarmed – this doesn’t impact more than a few thousand people (at best) so far. But when you look across many of the social networking sites (like Facebook, etc) and content sharing sites (like YouTube, Flickr, etc), the common abilities are to comment, favorite, and re-share content you find. FriendFeed does a great job pulling in all that content, but I think the ability to push the content OUT is where the real opportunity to succeed exists.

I believe the Internet today is highly fragmented and disassembled. I have my LinkedIN contacts and my Facebook friends, and some overlap. I have my photos on Flickr, my lengthy videos on YouTube, and my short videos on 12seconds.tv. I have people who read my Tweets and follow me on FriendFeed, but don’t subscribe to my blog. In every single site I just mentioned, users can comment and share content, but what they cannot do is have their experience contributed back to the source material universally. In other words, if someone comments on my blog here, my FriendFeed followers do not see it, and my blog readers here are unaware of FriendFeed users’ comments.

My belief is there is a big opportunity to fix this problem of content fragmentation. FriendFeed (or virtually anyone else, but they’ve built a good chunk of it already) can take their platform, and create an API that allows for bidirectional content delivery. At present, they are great at pulling in content, just don’t share it out well (and RSS isn’t good enough), and as we all know, anyone can take reservations, you gotta hold the reservation! If FriendFeed could build the de facto content aggregation and distribution platform that integrated across all content sharing and social networking services, it would become an instant acquisition target.

Sooner or later the “Internet’s middleman” must emerge. As people continue to sign up for more new services, our content and experiences become harder to share and find. The silos of content and, more importantly, content discussion, are frustrating and annoying to all but the earliest of tech adopters and “a-listers” (who seem quite willing to put up with anything just to try new stuff). For the majority of people out there, a certain degree of “registration fatigue” is setting in, and whether it’s FriendFeed or Facebook, or someone else entirely, there’s a big opportunity sitting out there, waiting for someone to jump in.

With all of the Internet incessantly consumed by Steve Jobs’ health (none of your business), the startups at DEMO/TC50 (can’t remember a single one of them yet), and the audacity of politicians who lie (what a surprise), it seems like not many people were paying attention to some other fairly important news last night. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was turned on last night, and the reports so far – it works. Or, well, we aren’t quite sure about the results, other than not destroying the universe as we know it.

I’ll be honest, I’m quite unaware of the actual technology here, and I don’t really understand the actual risk level. But if you weren’t aware either it works a little something like this. The humongous machine took 20 years to build, was extremely expensive, but could teach us how the universe actually works. Keeping the science talk out of it (from what I’m learning, this is how one becomes a successful politician – ignore things like scientific details and economics, those are just for them elite folks), basically this is like a nuclear reactor on Barry Bonds quality steroids.

When operational, the machine takes two atoms, and smashes them together really hard. Then they use a bunch of meters and instruments to see what happened (they also stream live video). Ideally they replicate the Big Bang (or, as creationists like to call it, Sunday at about 8am) and learn how it happened.

The only glitch, as some point out, is that if they really pull it off, recreating the Big Bang could be, well, in a word, catastrophic. Now some may recall the Y2K panic, which was a bunch of technically illiterate bizness-folks overreacting to a near-non-issue (and I’ll be honest, I was avoiding elevators that day). This time, however, it’s those science folks who were concerned, and fairly legitimately so. But, regardless of caution, the Swiss engineers at LHC decided to flip the switch of the machine designed 20 years ago (you know, before cell phones, laptops, TiVo) to see what would happen.

Again, I don’t know how real the threat was. Could’ve been nothing at all. But something does kinda bother me about the notion of a small group of people having enough power at their disposal that has no form of international oversight whatsoever. Call me crazy.

In an incredibly rare “scoop” I received an email from an anonymous Apple employee who shared an internal memo with me. Here are the contents (name withheld by request):

To All Apple Employees:

After 12 great years back at Apple, I’ve come to make an important decision about the future of the business. With great analysis of the current and future markets, I’ve decided it’s time for us to close shop. While this may surprise some of you, I think if you truly consider the situation I’m sure you’ll come to the same conclusion yourself.

Since I rejoined Apple, we’ve rebuilt the image of the company in its entirety. Our flagship product, OS X, represents the pinnacle in operating systems. Normally we’d pursue improvements, but after playing with the latest version of a Vista PC, it seems like there’s just no point in working on making ours any better.

Since the launch of the first generation iPod we’ve utterly dominated the portable MP3 player landscape. In fact we’re outselling our competition by such a ridiculous margin it often feels like we’re playing the Washington Generals!

In 2007 we built the best phone ever made. In 2008 we followed it up with the best phone ever made. This process is likely to repeat itself far into the future.

It’s great to win, but something changed after we launched the MacBook Air, the lightest, thinnest, fastest, shortest, longest, cleanest, tallest, and softest laptop ever built or ever will be built.

So I sat down with Jonathan Ive and we brainstormed other industries to go conquer. We debated products such as microwaves, vacuum cleaners, dish soap, and even breakfast cereal. We just couldn’t find anything else that would be really exciting to go monopolize.

Therefore, I’ve decided it’s time for us all to move on. It’s been a really fun time, we have the best team in the world. I believe the best thing we can possibly do is quit while we’re way ahead. Additionally, think of all the amazingly talented resources out there to join the workforce at other technology companies that could use some help (I’m thinking of you, Jerry!). Trust me, it’s a good thing.

Please remove all personal effects from your offices by 5pm, as all campus buildings will be demolished immediately thereafter. Apple Store employees will all have job offers from the new tenants of their current locations, as they are being converted into Red Lobster franchises.

And one more thing.

I’ll be showing up at the Chicago White Sox training camp next Spring. If that doesn’t work out, my back-up is seeing if the Jets need any extra QB’s next year.

Steve Jobs
Apple CEO

There it is, unaltered, and unverifiable. Until Tuesday morning, that is. Should be a keynote to remember it seems!

ps – just in case, can all stockbrokers think twice before making trading decisions because of something you read on this blog? thanks. on a related note, I am an Apple shareholder.

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One of the greatest challenges of building consumer electronics devices is dealing with that awkward timeframe between announcing new/next-generation products and ending the lifecycle of current ones. Sales tend to plummet and huge price incentives are thrown at customers to try to get the units off the shelves instead of in the dumpster. Naturally as a CE manufacturer you typically want to keep that window as short as possible, as it is otherwise harmful to pretty much in the foodchain, often including consumers.

I was, therefore, quite surprised to read an interview with a Samsung exec predicting the demise of the Blu-ray format within the next 5 years. I can’t see any possibly upside to this statement for Samsung, content makers, other device manufacturers, etc. As I’ve blogged about before, I’m still far from being sold on Blu-ray as a “winner”, but I guess that needs more context.

The NPD Group puts home DVD players at having penetrated 85% of US homes. That’s a win, unquestionably. It seems highly unlikely that Blu-ray will ever get to the same level. I’ve yet to hear/see any real positive word-of-mouth happening for the format, and the reasons seem similar as when I blogged about it last time. Here are my biggest reasons against mass-adoption of Blu-ray as a format:

Without extremely big, high-quality screens, it’s challenging to see the “ooh, ahh” factor of 1080p over even an upconverted standard DVD.

Upconverting DVD players are pretty much the standard already, and are available at extremely reasonable price points.

Consumers are still enjoying their 720p (the current HD standard) content, so seeing something “marginally better” doesn’t make too much of an impact.

Small content selection at a high price point.

Finally, I also believe we’re going to see an “iPodification” of video. In the 90s we were well on our way to replacing the CD as format, with SACD and DVD-Audio as possible follow-ups. Both offered vast improvements in sound quality that were pretty apparent with a decent stereo. Today, however, the average person is listening to music at worse-than-CD quality, on their iPods/iPhones, home stereos, Sonoses (or is that Sonii?), etc.

It seems fairly likely that the same pattern will occur with video, based on the combination of iPods, mobile video (cell phones), YouTube, Hulu, Amazon’s new service, and anything else that brings low-to-medium quality video to our eyes on a recurring basis. Don’t get me wrong, the big flat panels will still make it to the common living rooms, with glorious 5, 7, 11, or 2834-channel surround sound systems. But the time invested in these playback experiences is already in a questionable state (some say its on the decline, though there’s little real-world evidence as of yet), and all things being equal, seems unlikely to grow.

My hunch is the DVD as we know it today will be around for a long, long time, and the replacement format for it won’t involve physical media. TVs with built-in streaming capabilities are coming to store shelves (I’d probably avoid the first generation if I were you), and we’ll see a new generation of set-tops and gaming consoles with higher quality video when the time is right. Blu-ray definitely beat HD-DVD, but I still don’t believe it’ll ever be a dominant format for the masses.

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By announcing that it would cap residential broadband users to 250 GB in downloads per month, Comcast last week made a tacit admission that it can charge users $0.17 per gigabyte ($43/month for the service), cover its operating costs, and still make a profit. If Comcast is happy to charge these rates to its heaviest users, the people who put the biggest strain on its residential broadband infrastructure, why shouldn’t the regular users enjoy the same benefit?

The answer is that US broadband service is akin to a Chinese Buffet – the heavier users, who scarf down everything they can, are subsidized by lighter users, who pay more in exchange for consuming orders of magnitude less. The restaurant owners (and broadband providers), who scream “you eat like killer whale!” while a miniscule percentage of their users exceed some arbitrary limit, continue to pull in the same amount from everyone, making a killing on those who don’t eat very much, or only use their broadband to email, surf the web, watch a couple of YouTube videos every day, and download a few big files every month.

For a buffet, which is generally an infrequent indulgence, the system works. But for a recurring service like broadband, there’s no sense in charging customers a fixed rate when there is such a large disparity in consumption.

So here’s my modest proposal for Comcast, and other broadband providers: make broadband equal for all users. Set a monthly account maintenance/access fee (tier it to overall connection speed, if that’s your thing), and then charge everyone for the bits they actually use. The benefit to consumers is clear: if you’re paying for what you use, most users will pay less. The benefits for providers? With the battle for broadband users heating up, and 40% of the country still using dial-up services, the cable companies and telcos have a huge opportunity to attract vast swaths of new customers to not only their broadband services, but also their TV and phone services. Played right, the revenue increase from new sign-ups (if you were a new broadband customer, what kind of pricing would you choose?) could easily offset the initial decrease in broadband income.

There’s no reason for arbitrary caps if you charge for every bit. There’s no need to drive the people who use your service more than anyone else into the arms of a competitor (if, of course, there is one). Charge people for what they use, and customers will flock. Or, keep playing these ridiculous cat and mouse games that only upset your top users, and cause you reams of bad press with all the others. It’s not that hard a choice, broadband providers. Do the right thing.

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About

Jeremy Toeman is VP Products for CNET. He has over 15 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, smart TV and consumer technology. Prior ventures and projects include Viggle, Dijit Media, Sling Media, VUDU, Clicker, DivX, Rovi, Mediabolic, Boxee, and many other consumer technology companies. This blog represents nothing but his personal opinion and outlook on things.